Voice communication may be subject to different quality problems. For example, if the voice communication is conducted on a packet-switch network, due to delay jitters occurring in the network or due to bad channel conditions, such as fading or interference with WIFI, some packets may be lost, which makes the voice perceived by the listener not continuous. Due to the packet losses, or due to the measures adopted to conceal the packet losses such as packets interpolation or extrapolation, artifacts may occur in the voice heard by the listener and make the heard voice sounds unnatural.
Even if there are no artifacts or packet losses, sometimes the talker's silence may be misunderstood by the listener as the network's failure and thus the listener's experience of the voice communication system is not so good, especially when the transmitting side pre-processing suppresses the background noise so completely (or when the system just transmits empty packets without any information) that the listener just hear complete silence.